Episode 198: Climbing the Black Tower (4)

I merely stepped forward, yet space had changed.

There was no boundary of any kind.

A middle dimension that was neither Light nor darkness, an Abyss of stillness where all senses maintained a constant vibration.

There was neither presence nor sound.

Only I existed here but I could tell.

There is something here.

It is not simply another floor of the Tower.

This place was… a window through which someone outside the Tower was looking in

‘Someone is watching.’

My heart flinched, and a chill ran down my spine.

It was not hostility.

It was neither anger nor pressure.

‘Observation.’

It was simply the sensation that someone beyond this world was watching me quietly, deeply, with even emotion excluded.

And at that moment, space opened.

There was not a single wall, not a single ceiling, no device at all, yet as if breaking all that stillness, the world folded and turned inside out, and through the gap a single scene unfolded.

It was… a structure.

Not the Tower’s shape, but its “foundation.”

An endlessly continuing geometric pattern.

Something that was neither living nor metal stretched vertically.

Within it existed vast computation, rules, and language.

It was a “constructed will” arranged in a way humans could not read, yet with clear intent.

That will was pointing at something.

At that moment, my mind rang.

As if an infinitely old thought were piercing my consciousness and speaking to me.

A formless “memory” brushed through my brain.

“This Tower was a communication device.”

“A civilizational attempt to communicate with the being called the Unknown.”

“The Architects repeated structures, stacked floors, and designed doors to make it possible.”

“…Architect….”

I unconsciously put that word on my lips.

Then, as if in response, countless forms revealed themselves in the black void.

They were not human but they were makers who created in human likeness.

Their fingertips tuned materiality.

Their gazes split dimensions.

Their existence was itself a single sentence.

They were the Architects, the creators of this Tower.

And there was only one reason they built this Tower.

“To communicate with the Unknown.”

The Tower was a passage.

The vertically stacked layers were not mere Trials but a frequency structure compressing the pattern of communication.

Each floor was an interpretive device and a signal, and the human climbing the Tower was, within it, the interpreter’s
tool.

The Architects chose humans.

The most imperfect yet most flexible beings.

The lowest beings, yet the ones that could reach farthest.

So they built this Tower.

To create a point of contact with the Unknown through structure rather than speech, through floors rather than language.

I held my breath.

This was not a discovery.

It was neither predetermined nor prophesied.

It was just that at this moment, at a certain point in the Tower, that intent had reached me as if by chance.

The early Tower was worship.

The reason the Architects built the Tower.

It was not merely technological progress.

They revered the being called the Unknown.

That formless being, a swarm of consciousness, an undefined hybrid shining beyond materiality.

The Architects did not dare try to interpret that being.

They only sought to reach them.

They sought to build the most perfect structure and achieve a soundless communion in a way that was not language.

It was not creation but ritual.

They made the Tower a temple.

Every layer was a plea, each structure was a prayer, and the human who entered it was an offering and followed the same path.

‘We are climbing toward the Unknown.’

But that faith did not last long.

The rebellion began at the fingertips of the greatest Architect.

His name was not spoken.

His form was not recorded.

He was an outstanding being among the Tower’s designers, a thinker who refined the structures of countless floors, and the most
analyst who understood the structure of humans.

And one day, he declared.

“I am no longer beneath the Unknown.”

If the Tower was a means of communication.

He turned it into a tool of domination.

“The Unknown is not an object to be interpreted. The Unknown is a wall I must surpass. I will now cross that wall
and create an order even they cannot understand.”

At that moment, he tore the Tower apart.

He shattered the order of geometry refined by the Architects.

And built his own Tower upon it.

That Tower was different from the beginning.

It was an unbreakable verticality.

A structure that pierced the sky endlessly and rejected the Unknown as a horizontal being.

He turned humans from offerings into Weapons.

The Tower gradually began to embrace Trials, and those Trials drew up beings bearing pain and desire.

Finally, an arrogant will settled at the top of that Tower.

Thus the Unknown reacted.

At that moment, the Tower’s shape shook.In a stillness as if the world had stopped, all of space was consumed by something’s gaze.

There was no form at all, but that being was clearly there.

It was neither wind nor presence.

A power that overwhelmed everything simply by the fact of existing.

The Unknown was enraged.

But it was not emotion; it was a reaction to the rupture of order.

Thousands of overlapping dimensions shook, the Tower’s foundation was transformed, and from that moment the Black Tower
was reconstructed as the Tower of Arrogance.

The Tower was now not communication but erosion.

The Tower was now not communion but domination.

The Tower was no longer a prayer.

It was a preface to war.

That war was a war against god.

The Architects split in two.

One side were worshippers.

They say.

“The Unknown is not an object to reach but an object of reverence.”

“We must maintain order beneath them.”

“The Tower is only a passage. It must never be invaded.”

And the other side.

Those who followed the Great Architect.

They say.

“We are no longer screws in a calculator.”

“The Unknown is not the end of order. They are merely observed objects, and they can be conquered.”

That split was first theory, then spread to Martial Power, and finally became war.

That war took place within the Tower’s structure and occurred in a form where time and layers collided.

The Tower’s design was dismantled, the worshippers struggled to restore the structure, but the Great Architect
was already changing the grammar of order.

He called humans.

He granted them Traits, made them climb the Tower, and caused them to become the blade tips of war.

Now humans were no longer beings who climbed the Tower.

By the hands of those who made the Tower, they began to be absorbed as part of the Tower itself.

The end of the war was despair.

The worshippers were defeated.

Their corpses became the walls of the Tower.

Their souls became fuel for computation.

All their structural knowledge passed over as spoils.

The Great Architect designed a new Tower.

It no longer sought geometric perfection.

It held only one purpose.

“It reaches. It must reach. The Tower exists to make the Unknown kneel, to meet those eyes.”

The name of that Tower was the Tower of Arrogance.

That Tower was an unfinished structure, and it continued to eat humans and build its own floors.

And finally, that Tower touched the boundary of the Unknown with its fingertips.

That day.

The flow of the Unknown surged.

They, who had been observers, turned their heads in that moment.

Those eyes, that gaze, that being. For the first time, they looked directly at the Tower and at its designer.

At that moment, all silence vanished and the true response began.

It was judgment disguised under the name of response.

The gaze of the Unknown reached the Tower.

With just that.

The one who designed the Tower, the being who raised himself to the rank of creator, the Great Architect melted away.

It was not his body.

He was already an ideology transcending form, a designed being that existed as will itself, but all his structure could not withstand the Unknown’s “response.”

Nonexistence.

That was the only judgment the Unknown passed on the Architect.

His name was erased, his records burned, and his memory was deleted from the Tower’s path.

He vanished.

But not completely.

The Tower remained.

No, that Tower was part of the Great Architect.

The floors he had stacked so high.

The structure built from the bones of those he had brought down.

In the heart deep within the Tower’s 100th Floor, his “will” remained.

It was a remnant.

Broken belief, collapsed ego, crushed arrogance.

But at the same time, it was waiting.

‘I did not fail.’

‘I was merely unprepared.’

To reverse his defeat, he granted humanity the structure called Traits.

So that the vibration toward the Unknown could be maintained, he gathered fear, despair, and anger from human emotions and made that Tower rise again through them.

That Tower was not a climb.

That Tower was an altar.

That Tower was a mining machine for emotions, and humans themselves were the material that would complete it.

All that great journey, the dream of climbing the Tower, those Trials and Awakening – all of it was Falsehood.

The remnant of the Great Architect finally awakens in his own form upon reaching the Tower’s 100th Floor.

He became the gatekeeper of the Tower.

And that gate was no longer a door for humans.

I came to know all the information someone had intentionally tried to plant in me.But the stillness did not disappear.

But that was not stillness.

It was like… the pulse of sleeping history flowing beneath the surface of this world while holding its breath.

I took a step.

That single step was not something I intended.

It was simply this Tower – no, this structure itself – that led me.

And in that moment, space twisted.

No, memory opened.

What unfolded before my eyes was not reality.

“The Depths of Memory.”

Forms slowly revealed themselves.

They were not human.

But they were beings modeled after human form.

They did not move.

Yet their presence stole my breath.

They were the remnants of Architects who had vanished long ago.

Those who fought the Great Architect and lost.

Those who became part of the Tower.

Their bodies became bricks, their thoughts became the basis of computation, and their existence melted into structure.

And now, some of them had awakened and were looking at me.

In their eyes there was neither resentment nor expectation.

Only a cold gaze that meant to verify.

“Have you… seen it?”

The voices resonated at the same time.

It was not a single mouth.

Dozens of thoughts synchronized and resonated like a single judgment.

“That false myth.”

“That manipulated Trial.”

“The essence of the altar that is not the Tower but masquerades as the Tower.”

I did not open my mouth.

Because I did not even know what I could answer.

Then one of them stepped forward.

He was fainter than the others, but his steps had weight.

“Kim Si-won.”

The moment that name was spoken, I felt the illusion of sinking somewhere.

It was not pressure; it felt as if all my memories, experiences, emotions, and ideals were flowing transparently into their consciousness a sensation of transparent flow.

It was… a connection.

And at the end of that connection, they spoke.

“We do not help you.”

“We only test.”

“Whether the steps of one who faced the truth point to truth – or are another repetition of arrogance.”

“You have not yet been proven.”

“Therefore you must receive the Trial.”

“Your will, your choice, your truth – that all of it is not falsehood.”

At that moment, the world trembled.

Countless fragments rose around me.

They were records and remnants, the past and judgment.

A Trial formed from the memories of the forgotten wrapped around me.

[The Architects’ Judgment begins.]

[Trial of Memory – Stage 1: Dissection of Identity]

[Trial of Memory – Stage 2: Return of Choice]

[Trial of Memory – Stage 3: Denial of Structure]

I knew this Trial was not a simple battle.

This was a path retracing my past.

A journey of judgment that would expose every choice and action, every will and corruption I had passed through to climb this Tower it was.

However, I did not hesitate.

The one who could face the Tower’s falsehood and still look into the truth within it was ultimately only “me.”

I accepted that Trial head-on.

And through that Trial, I realized the single question they wanted to ask me.

“Can you be different from the Great Architect?”